The world of Apple patents is exciting and fun. It gives us a little window into Apple Park’s most secret lab and gives us a glimpse into what the company is working on or was working on. Today we see some of the most interesting and varied patents.
A MacBook Pro with a TouchBar with Force Touch
Today’s first patent, collected by Patently Apple, concerns the arrival of Force Touch on the Touch Bar of the MacBook Pro. The truth is, we’re expecting a redesign for these machines sometime in the year, so who knows? In a patent filed in May 2019, the Cupertino-based company explained the development and circuitry needed to bring force sensing to the Mac’s Touch Bar.
One of the Force Touch applications of the Mac Touch Bar, besides allowing us deeper navigation between menus, is to avoid accidental touches. Something that, on the other hand, seems easier to implement introduce a slight delay in responses, just like Big Sur did with the Siri button.
If we take into account the date of the patent, it is possible that the presence of Force Touch in the Apple Watch Series 6 remains suspended by a thread. Now, with everything we’ve seen, it looks like Apple has given up on those plans and, in the end, brought the feature through software.
An Apple Watch to measure blood pressure
In another patent, Apple explains how an Apple Watch would manage to constantly measure our blood pressure. A patent that seems to tell us where the Apple Watch is going in terms of functionality, even in the short term. Entitled “Electrical Coupling of the Heart Pulse Transit Time (PTT) Measurement System for Blood Pressure Measurement,” this patent details how the electrical signals that an Apple Watch can pick up would allow a blood pressure measurement. constant, without user intervention.
Current approaches to ambulatory and home blood pressure measurement … do not provide continuous blood pressure measurement. In addition, when an oscillometric cuff is used to measure a person’s blood pressure while sleeping, intermittent inflation and deflation of the cuff can disrupt the person’s sleep pattern, thereby adversely affecting the subject to some extent and potentially affecting blood pressure. the person during sleep.
Thus, practical and effective approaches to continuous and non-invasive blood pressure measurement remain interesting.
Continuous and non-intrusive measurement, but with something more than the Apple Watch.
Apple proposes that the Apple Watch measures the pressure at calculate how long it takes for a particular pulse to travel from the heart to the wrist.
The output of a pulse arrival sensor coupled to the wrist device is processed to detect when a blood pressure pulse generated by expelling the volume of blood from the left ventricle reaches the wrist.
A pulse transit time (PTT) is calculated for the transit of the arterial pressure pulse from the left ventricle to the wrist.
This forces the person to wear a small electrode in addition to the Apple Watch, suggesting that, if this feature were to happen, it would do so as a supplement to the watch and intended only for cases that really need this measurement.
As we always remember, not all patents reach the end products. But in any case, they give us a photograph, always in retrospect given the time it takes us to know the different patents, of what Apple is developing.
